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A researcher is advising drivers not to use a mobile app for General Motors Co's (GM.N) OnStar vehicle communications system, saying hackers can exploit a security flaw in the product to unlock cars... read more

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Flashback infection worse than Conficker?

Two independent sources have now confirmed that at least 600,000 Macs worldwide have been infected with the malware downloader called Flashback. That number is not just an estimate. It’s a count of unique hardware IDs reporting in to a command-and-control server.

First Dr. Web, a Russian security company, published its findings. The company’s analysts cleverly redirected the botnet traffic to their own servers and thus were able to count infected hosts. The initial report was 550,000 infected machines running Mac OS X on April 4. Later that day, the analyst responsible for the original research reported that the count had increased to 600,000.

That report inspired some skepticism among readers of my initial post, who wondered whether the numbers were accurate. Apparently, other security researchers were equally skeptical, leading Kaspersky Labs to replicate the research: